Tag Archives: Decoration Day

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Decoration Day, Once

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It seems early this year, Memorial Day, or the month seems long, but of course it is neither of those things, just a trick of the calendar, not unlike the way the clock plays tricks on us when we turn them back or spring them forward. 

When I was a child my mother filled the trunk of the car with iris and peonies, bunches as big as barrels, swimming in old galvanized tubs filled with water.  Tossed along side them were scissors and ancient knives with rusty blades, relics that lived their wretched and used up lives hidden away in the dark and cobwebby garage. In their neglected state they looked menacing, but even as kids we could tell they wouldn’t be up to the job of cutting stems, removing bruised and broken leaves. 

Elmwood Cemetery was busy on those Saturday mornings in late May,  some families more organized and serious than others. We filled up jars and cheap vases with water at the spigot, Mother selected stems of peony, stalks of iris and gathered them together, but we were slapdash as a family in this pursuit.  

Two or three of the kids had broken free and were running around, mother sloshing water and dropping flowers as she struggled up the slope to our family plots, mostly wanting to get her duty dispatched for another year. Other families approached the same task with an orderliness we lacked.  They had baskets, and hand tools, and arrangements professionally done. 

Their cars were neatly parked while ours looked like a bank robbery gone wrong. The odd angle, doors open, trunk popped, a sense of chaos and abandonment, accomplices scattered to the winds. It seemed half the town had turned out to tend  their dead, and while it wasn’t exactly a somber morning, there was a propriety that dictated greetings be limited to slight nods, if that.  Unusual for a place in time that valued neighborliness, just not right now, not here. On this we did not intrude.

And yet, we were interested in our neighbors, or rather the neighbors of our loved ones. We marveled at how both sets of grandparents were buried just a few yards from each other, even though the families didn’t come to know each other until my parents married. Over there distant cousins, just here the great-grandparents of children with whom we went to school.  Names we knew from family stories when we should not have been listening. 

We walked around this little neighborhood to visit them all and if my father went with us to decorate the graves, he told stories and made connections that were sweet and almost always funny.  We fought over who would get the little flag they handed out at the cemetery entrance for veterans, the one that went on our grandfather’s grave, he a soldier of the Great War. Placing it was a honor,  although we didn’t quite understand.  Mostly we just did the sibling math,  there being only one flag and five of us, so getting your hands on it first meant something.

Memorial Day always seemed to catch us just a little by surprise.  We might have a cookout, but it was always an afterthought, a last-minute affair, as if the end of the school year and the thought of a yawning, endless summer exhausted us all.  

Time has changed custom, and duty, and what grows in our yards.  The peonies my mother counted on have long since bloomed in our gardens.  Iris are now specimen plants, no longer grown in great swaths that line walks and foundations and along the dark patches of fencerows, where they smelled deeply of purple and damp earth. 

Perhaps I’ll call around and see who is up for some impromptu gathering, because we should do something, although Memorial Day seems less like a holiday to celebrate and more like one to observe. I’ll see who may want to meet up at Elmwood, the highest point in the county, the reason this acreage was chosen.  Lay some flowers I have brought from my yard, place the flag at my grandfather’s stone, see again irises, peonies in galvanized buckets, and the green grace and the gentle slope and children running as they call to each other, “over here.”

“Over here. I’ve found them. We are over here.”  

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Decoration Day, Then and Now

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My grandmother called it Decoration Day and told stories of picnicking among the stones of her departed family members, in a prairie cemetery in Indian Territory, in what is now east Oklahoma. The Paxtons would descend on the windswept and flat parcel of land and spend the whole day. They sang. They played games. They cleaned the graves of dead flowers and planted new ones to be buffeted by the wind, but that was just fine, because it gave the impression of dancing, those bobbing heads, in a stark and lonely place, there, on the outskirts of town.


I think she wanted us to recreate the picnic at Elmwood Cemetery or, rather, she wished we could, but knew such a thing would be impossible, unseemly, not done. The story appalled my mother. But Granny never failed to mention it on those long-ago Saturday mornings as she popped the trunk and hauled out tools, watering cans and washtubs full of flowers.


We followed her, our Keds and Red Ball Jets growing wet at the toes, then cold and uncomfortable as we trudged up the small rise to the place where our people lay, all of them, a case of serendipity having orchestrated both sets of grandparents with plots in spitting distance of each other.


“Look for the statute of the girl missing a finger,” she called over her shoulder. “That is our landmark.” And there she is, Bernice Fitts, who left this world at the age of eighteen, a giantess missing a finger, pointing, and not pointing, in the direction of the grandfather I never knew.
We were always excited, but subdued, too. We understood, as much as we were able, that this was a solemn duty and there were things here, mysterious and big, echoes of Sunday sermons, bellies of whales, lion’s dens, the dead to rise again. All of it scary and thrilling and incomprehensible.


But it was fun, too. An outing. A tradition. We were not a family to visit the cemetery regularly; we didn’t decorate graves for the seasons, on holidays or the birthdays of the departed. We might wander up to Elmwood on a pretty day, a moody afternoon, but never to linger.


Yet, Memorial Day was sacred, although we never used that word. But to ignore it, to miss one, would wrack me with guilt, and my sister, too.


Now, we call up, half-ashamed, asking if the other has taken flowers to the cemetery, hoping the answer is yes, so we are off the hook. The answer is always, no. We scurry around then, and gather plants and a watering can, and tend the graves in the most perfunctory of ways. But we feel better afterward, and both of us sigh with relief and satisfaction as we pull out onto Breckenridge and get on with our day. A duty done.


My mother was in the habit there toward the end of buying hanging baskets she would place on the graves and retrieve later for her summer garden. This was a great idea I thought, yet it worried her someone would steal them, so she sent me out early on Tuesday morning to bring them home. And people do steal them. Never our pots because they weren’t special, just some impatiens, still too small to make much of a display, but the nice ones, the specially made arrangements, these disappear.


We need not discuss what makes people do this, how low-bred, how disrespectful. We know exactly the sort to help themselves to a remembrance left for a loved one. To dwell on it is to wish for a stone hut on an isolated island in which to live out our days, away from people, just about all of them. To give up on them.


And some days I do give up on them. But not most days.

And some days I remember so clearly being a child of four, seven, ten.
The cool and damp of a May morning, the bucket of peonies in my grandmother’s trunk, children running in a game to find their grandparents who are only stories to them, faded photos, this gray stone. Another child, or just so recently a child, her head bending on a slender neck, her upraised and fingerless hand, showing the way.